Today is Shushan Purim, a unique day in the cycle of Jewish holidays. Purim is the only holiday whose date depends on where you happen to celebrate it. For most of the world, Purim was yesterday. However, if you happen to reside in Jerusalem or the city of Shushan (where the story of Purim took place) Purim is today. Therefore, the observance is called "Shushan Purim."

Only a few of the hamantashen I made with my children are left on Shushan Purim.

This oddity is the result of a minor detail of the story of Purim in the Book of Esther. According to the story, Haman connived to have the Jews of Persia destroyed on the thirteenth day of the month of Adar. However, after his plot was revealed by Mordechai and Esther, the king ordered the execution of Haman and issued a new decree allowing the Jews to defend themselves on that day. Not surprisingly, the Jews succeeded in overcoming their enemies. (How many people are going to join a fight against the Jews when their chief enemy and his ten sons have just been hanged in the capital?)

Queen Esther then instituted the holiday of Purim for the day after the Jews were permitted to defend themselves. It is an important distinction for the holiday. Purim does not celebrate a military triumph. It celebrates the day of "rejoicing and feasting" that followed. That is why Purim is on the fourteenth day of Adar, not the thirteenth.

However, the text tells us that in the capital city of Shushan, the King permitted the Jews to defend themselves for an additional day. They fought against their enemies on both the thirteenth and fourteenth of Adar. The book of Esther is careful to explain, therefore, that Purim could not be celebrated in Shushan until the fifteenth day. On that day, the Jews of the capital would follow the Jews of the "unwalled towns" of the kingdom by "sending gifts to each other" (Esther 9:12-19).

This is the reason that Purim still is celebrated a day late in Shushan and in Jerusalem, whose walls were standing back in the days of Joshua. Today is the day that Jews in Jerusalem read the Megillah with its blessings and deliver mishloach manot, gifts of food, to their friends.

For people today who are concerned with reviving and reinvigorating the joy of Judaism, Shushan Purim has an important lesson. We must be careful to be clear about why we are celebrating. We change the date of a holiday to avoid even the appearance that we are celebrating the downfall of our foes.

Real joy is not about triumphalism. We do not rejoice over the death of Haman. We do not celebrate by firing our weapons into the air. Rather, our best celebrations are always about gratitude. We wait a day after our temporal victory and rejoice, instead, over the miracle of an unseen presence who delivers us and guides us. We celebrate by laying down our weapons and taking a bag of cookies over to our neighbors' homes.

The Shabbat that begins tonight is known as Shabbat Zachor, and its special meaning involves one of the oddest paradoxes in the Torah. Shabbat Zachor, the "Sabbath of Remembrance," always falls on the Shabbat before Purim. Its name comes from a special additional Torah passage that is read in the morning service from Deuteronomy 25:17-19:

Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey after you left Egypt—how, undeterred by fear of God, they surprised you on the march, when you were famished and weary, and cut down all the stragglers in your rear. Therefore, when Adonai your God grants you safety from all your enemies around you, in the land that Adonai your God is giving you as a hereditary portion, you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget!

This is a strange commandment. We are obliged to remember to blot out the memory of Amalek. How do you do that? How does a person remember to forget?

It's helpful to understand the symbolic meaning of the nation called Amalek in this passage, and the relationship of Amalek to the holiday of Purim.

Later Jewish tradition imagined Amalek as the eternal enemy of Israel that would appear in various guises throughout history. In the book of Exodus, we are taught that "Adonai will have war with Amalek from generation to generation" (Exodus 17:16). Amalek is not just a nation that fought treacherously against Israel once-upon-a-time, during the travel through the wilderness. They are the embodiment of enmity against God that is unending. Amalek is the undying human capacity for evil.

Now, evil is a particularly difficult problem for Judaism as a strictly monotheistic tradition. If there is one God, who is the master and creator of everything, how can there be a separate power in the universe that is in opposition to God? The classical Jewish answer—that evil is not a separate force, but is only the shadow of God's absence—cannot answer our darkest questions adequately. How is it that deeply malevolent, actively destructive evil can exist in a universe that is ruled solely by a benevolent and all-powerful God?

This is not an idle or hypothetical question for Judaism and for Jews. The Jewish people, who most strenuously insist on God's unity, are also the people whose history most clearly declares the reality of evil. Throughout our generations, we have been victims of schemes and plots that originate in the darkest and most hateful recesses of the human psyche.

Haman, the villain of the Purim story, is viewed as the representative of Amalek in the time of the Persian Empire. He is known in the book of Esther as "Haman the Agagite," and so he bears the name of King Agag, the Amalekite ruler who was defeated by King Saul (I Samuel 15:7-9). The entire holiday of Purim can be viewed as a way to fulfill the commandment to remember to "blot out the memory of Amalek." We remember that the evil of Haman exists in the world—an evil that would wipe us out for no reason and without mercy—and then we blot that memory out with laughter, drink, joy and noisy groggers.

There is a tradition, on Purim, of writing the name of Amalek in chalk on the bottom of ones shoes. That way, as we parade around on the holiday, we are also wiping away the name with each festive footfall. Another tradition associated with destroying the name of Amalek is practiced by Jewish ritual scribes. A sofer will test his of her quill for writing a Torah scroll, a mezuzah or tefilin by first writing the name of Amalek and then crossing it out.

But why the paradox? If we should always remember Amalek, why should we also strive to forget? Why should we drive the name from memory? I believe the teaching to be a reflection of the paradox that evil itself represents in Jewish tradition.

We cannot deny evil. We may want to believe in a God who is present in all things—in our sorrow as much in our joy—but we cannot escape that we live in a universe that includes things that are beyond our ability to reconcile with God. Judaism is too realistic to just brush aside evil as a mere illusion. We are bound to remember it.

Yet, we also are given a tool to drive it away. Evil cannot be fought by filling our minds with equal measures of hatred and anger. When we try to fight evil with evil, we only add to the evil present in our world. We would only multiply the denial of God and God's Torah that Amalek represents. We must forever oppose evil, yes, but we also must have the courage to engage in constructive forgetfulness.

When we choose to live our lives with joy, despite evil, we help to destroy evil. When we know our hurtful past, and yet live as though it had no hold on us, we defeat it. On Purim, we are asked to behave (perhaps with the aid of a drink or two) as if there were no difference between "Cursed be Haman" and "Blessed be Mordechai." The idea is not to deny the existence of the evil represented by Haman the Agagite, but to defeat the power of evil by looking beyond it to the true power behind creation.

That is what we must remember. Remember to wipe out the memory of evil from your consciousness, and allow yourself to connect instead to the source of life.

We live in a world that does not have clear answers to many of life's most difficult questions. Sometimes, people imagine they can find their answers in a single book—the Bible. People turn to the Bible as if it were a direct line to God, and as if God has only one truth for all times and all situations. People turn to the Bible for answers to questions that it never was intended to answer. I have seen my share of those questions right here on this website.

If you don't run a website yourself, you may not know that it is possible for a webmaster to see the search terms of all the Google searches that have led people to his or her site. Here is a small smattering of the actual questions posed to Google that have brought people to rebjeff.com:

"What does the Bible say about marriage?""What does the Bible say about homosexuality?""What does the Bible say about lying?""What does the Bible say about women's rights?""What does the Bible say about having sex on Shabbat?""What does the Bible say about masturbation?""What does the Bible say about New York?""What does the Bible say about being born on February 29?""What does the Bible say about Barack Obama?"

I can't count them all, but I would say that there have been more than a thousand searches leading to this site in which someone has asked a question phrased like, "What does the Bible say about…" (It should be no surprise that there are a lot of searches that have to do with sex, too. I'm told that it's a very popular topic on the internet.)

Of course it is absurd to ask what the Bible thinks about a city that was founded 1,500 years after the latest biblical text was written, about a U.S. President who was born 300 years after that, or about a date in a calendar system that that Bible's authors did not even use. But there is a deeper problem I see in these question about the fundamental assumptions that many people have about the Bible.

These questions suggest that people hope to find definitive answers to important issues in their lives by opening a Bible. For example, one person found this website by asking Google, "What does the Bible say about offense in marriage?" The questioner only stayed on the site for seven seconds, so it's possible that he or she did not find an answer. But what answer was this person hoping to find?

Was this a question from a man who is frustrated that his wife's behavior toward him is offensive? Is he hoping that the Bible will say something that will allow him to tell his wife, "God says your behavior is wrong. It's in the Bible!" It is as if people believe that the Bible is the ultimate way to settle all debates. If you can find a passage in the Bible that supports your cause, you can throw it in the face of someone else and declare yourself to be saintly and your opponent to be sinful.

Fortunately, the Bible does not work that way. In fact, since the Bible is written by and for a society very different from our own, sometimes, the best we can do is to find the underlying values in the Bible and struggle to fit them into our situations.

For example, if the questioner had asked me, "What does the Bible say about offense in marriage," I might have pointed out the story about Abram, Sarai and Hagar. Sarai, being barren, told her husband, Abram, to sleep with her slave, Hagar, and to father a child with her. Abram obeyed his wife. When he did, though, Sarai became jealous of Hagar and blamed Abram for her plight. Hagar then ran away because of the terrible way Sarai treated her, until an angel of God told Hagar to go back and be comforted by the knowledge that her son would become the father of a great nation (Genesis 16).

In the 21st century, we look at this story and wonder what it could possibly teach us. We don't have slaves. We don't practice polygamy. We find the whole story impossible in our times. Yet, this is a story about "offense in marriage" and its answers are all ambiguity.

Rather than stating clearly which characters are in the right or in the wrong, the Bible describes an emotionally messy situation. Now, that is something to which we can relate. We know all about having messy lives.

Sarai was grief-striken by her inability to have children, and she made a rash choice—just as we might. Abram was torn between his desire to have children, his loyalty to his wife, and the need to preserve the peace of his family—just as we might. Hagar was confused by the misery of her life weighed against the promise of a better future for her child—just as we might. In this story, there are no winners and no losers. Each character just tries to deal with a difficult situation and to do what is right in a world with no clear moral signposts—just as we should.

That, more than anything else, is what the Bible says about life. It is messy. It poses problems with which we must struggle. The Bible is not a rulebook for life. Rather, it is a meditation on the challenges of life, and also the possibility that we can make good choices despite the confusion we sense around us.

Some might object that the Bible does contain rules. In fact, a huge portion of the books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy is consumed with the promulgation of God's commandments. Surely, that makes up a rulebook, doesn't it?

Yes and no. Both Judaism and Christianity—the two religions that hold the Hebrew Bible as a sacred text—have long traditions of interpreting the commandments of the Bible in ways that travel far from the written text. As a Jew, you cannot ask, "What does the Bible say about…?," without also asking the question, "What do the rabbis, commentators and interpreters say about it?" When you do, you will find that the authorities often disagree with each other. In Judaism, the struggle to understand the text is the mirror of the struggle each of us must undertake to make the best choices we can in a life of uncertainty.

"What does the Bible say about…" is not a bad question. It's just that the answers we should expect are not simple. They are as complicated as life itself. Our job is to look for inspiration in the Bible—not easy solutions—and to come to our own understanding of what the words mean to us.

So, if you want to know what the Bible says about the President, or Leap Year Day, or sex, then you should open it up—and open up yourself as well.

I hear this question with surprising regularity. We are used to seeing angels in Christian art and hearing about them in Christian spirituality, so we might think they are a Christian idea. Since Judaism holds firmly to a single, incorporeal God, Jews might assume there is no place in Judaism for other heavenly beings.

Well, of course, there are angels in Judaism. Angels are directly mentioned in several important stories in the Hebrew Bible. Jacob dreamed about angels ascending and descending a ladder between heaven and earth (Genesis 28:12)? The prophet, Isaiah, had a vision of angels surrounding God and shouting, "Holy! Holy! Holy!" (Kadosh! Kadosh! Kadosh!) back and forth (Isaiah 6:1-5). There are many other examples.

In this week's Torah portion (Terumah) there is a description of the image of angels that decorated the Ark of the Covenant in which the stones of the Ten Commandments were stored in the Tabernacle. They are described in elaborate, if inscrutable, detail:

Make two cherubim of gold—make them of hammered work—at the two ends of the cover. Make one cherub at one end and the other cherub at the other end; of one piece with the cover shall you make the cherubim at its two ends. The cherubim shall have their wings spread out above, shielding the cover with their wings. They shall confront each other, the faces of the cherubim being turned toward the cover. Place the cover on top of the Ark, after depositing inside the Ark the Pact that I will give you. There I will meet with you, and I will impart to you—from above the cover, from between the two cherubim that are on top of the Ark of the Pact—all that I will command you concerning the Israelite people. —Exodus 25:18-22

The two angels on top of the Ark appear to have great importance in this text. They were the protectors of the holiest object, kept in the holiest place, of all Israel. They formed the throne upon which God's presence appeared to command the Israelites. This raises difficult questions about the possibility of idolatry right in the Holy of Holies. How do we reconcile the cherubim with the clear prohibition in the Torah against worshipping other divine beings and against worshipping images sculpted by human hands?

Maimonides, the great Jewish medieval philosopher, argued that the prohibition agains idolatry is only against images that have been devised by human beings. Since the cherubim on top of the Ark were commanded by God, they are not forbidden (Guide to the Perplexed, book 3, chapter 45). That argument may seem circular, but it makes some spiritual sense.

The reason for prohibiting idolatry is to prevent human beings from thinking of themselves as gods. As soon as we begin revering the things we have made for ourselves—our wealth, power, or status, for example—we have committed a form of idolatry. The cherubim, in contrast, reminded the ancient Israelites that the only images permissible in the Tabernacle were those specifically commanded by God.

Another rabbinic view states that the cherubim on the Ark were a concession to a human need. God recognized the we need something concrete to behold with reverence. The cherubim fill that need, but with the understanding that the true place of holiness is in the emptiness between their wings. God does not reside just in objects—God is in the spaces between.

We have not outgrown our need for something material to focus our reverence. Despite our prayers that declare, "All the earth is filled with God's glory" (Isaiah 6:3), we still build houses of worship and imagine that God is, somehow, more present there than in the ordinary places of our lives. We still regard the ark that holds our Torah scrolls as a sacred place, like the Ark of the Covenant in the Tabernacle of the desert. We do need to have sacred spaces, but they also should serve to remind us that sacred space surrounds us everywhere we go.

So, yes, Jews do believe in angels. However, as the two angels on the Ark of the Covenant remind us, we do not believe in them as divine beings separate from God. Rather, they are symbolic reminders of God around us all the time. They are a physical representation of a Presence that we, otherwise, could not differentiate from reality itself.

Late yesterday afternoon, as I enjoyed a Shabbat walk, I noticed the sky. Just a little bit lighter, I thought to myself, than it was at this hour a few weeks ago. Spring is coming and that lifts my heart.

Even in southern Florida where the weather is warm year-round, the winter months feel a bit darker and a bit duller. As the sky brightens, there is the beginning of a sense of renewal.

A glorious tree blooming today in the Temple courtyard.

Today is the 30th day of the month of Hebrew month of Sh'vat, which means that it has been thirty days since the last new moon. But the moon is on a cycle of 29 and a half days, so today and tomorrow are really the first days of the next new moon and the month of Adar. Jewish tradition tells us that "When Adar enters joy increases" (B. Talmud Ta'anit 29a).

That increase in joy usually is associated with the coming of the holiday of Purim, which is celebrated on the 14th of Adar, exactly two weeks from today. But the joy of Adar is also associated with the coming of spring. Even in the cold north, the first bulbs are starting to awaken under the soil as the earth gradually warms. Here in Florida, the flowers on some of our trees are exploding with joy.

Our tradition teaches us that we are obliged to fill our hearts with joy. Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav, who is said to have fought depression all his life, offered us this prayer:

God, I stand beaten and battered by the countless manifestations of my own inadequacies. Yet we must live with joy, overcome despair, seek, pursue and find every inkling of goodness, every positive point within ourselves, and so discover true joy. Aid me in this quest, O God. Help me find satisfaction and a deep, abiding pleasure in all that I have, in all that I do, in all that I am. —Likutei MoHaRan 1:282 (adaption by Moshe Mykoff and S.C. Mizrahi)

For those who are feeling beaten and battered by the darkness of winter and by the storms of life and sky, this is a time to focus on brightening our souls. Seek, pursue and create excuses for your own happiness. Be outdoors, sing, play, take pleasure, and delight in all growing things. It is among the best ways of praising the One who created us to be joyful.

When people fight, and they strike a pregnant woman so that her child comes out, but no injury appears, he shall pay what the woman's husband imposes and he will give it by the judges. But if there is injury, you shall give life in place of life, eye in place of eye, tooth in place of tooth, hand in place of hand, foot in place of foot, burn in place of burn, wound in place of wound, bruise in place of bruise.—Exodus 21:22-25

This week's Torah portion (Mishpatim) includes this passage that is often cited when Jews discuss abortion. The text implies that causing the death of an unborn child should not be considered murder. The punishment for causing such a death is a fine, not the death penalty. The case is treated entirely differently in the Torah than a case in which a person kills another (already born) human being, whether the death was intentional or unintentional.

For centuries, commentators have used these verses as evidence that the Torah does not regard the abortion of a fetus to be murder. Where abortion is proscribed in Jewish tradition, it is regarded as a crime of shedding blood, not the taking of life. Also, based in part on this passage, Jewish law actually demands that a fetus be aborted if it poses a threat to the life of the mother.

And what of the logic of "an eye in place of an eye, a tooth in place of a tooth"? Won't that, as the saying goes, leave everyone blind and toothless? Jewish tradition holds that these verses, and others like them, should be interpreted to refer to monetary damages. A person who is responsible for causing another person to lose sight in an eye should pay compensation to that person according to the value of an eye, not by having his own eye put out.

Contemporary biblical scholars find this passage about a pregnant woman to be uncommonly difficult to untangle. There are so many unanswered and unanswerable questions. Does the woman miscarry, or does she give birth prematurely? Is the "eye-for-an-eye" injury suffered by the fetus, or is it the mother? Can a law about an accidental injury be applied meaningfully to an intentional abortion, or is that a flawed comparison?

There is something about the way both traditional commentators and modern scholars look at this passage that troubles me. There is a coldness to the parsing and analyzing of the text. This is a passage that is laden with powerful emotions that should not be ignored when we try to fit the words to our contemporary issues and controversies.

A pregnant woman has been pushed aside and hurt while others quarreled, perhaps to the extent that she has miscarried. How could we imagine that there might be "no injury" in such a situation? Her husband has the right to demand payment for damages incurred. Damages to whom? To the unborn child? To the mother? Or, perhaps, to the man himself? The law seem uncaring to the woman. What might she rightfully demand in this situation? What about her grief over the loss of the child? Is it fair to settle such a matter with the exchange of coins?

This may be the reason the text talks in this story about "life in place of life." (The Hebrew could also be translated as "a soul in place of a soul"). This is a story in which one life touches upon so many other lives. The unborn child. The mother. The father. The assailant. Even the judges. Everyone becomes part of a tangle of lives standing in the place of other lives in a heartbreaking situation … and all because people let things get out of hand when they were fighting and quarreling. We too easily forget how easily one life can affect many other lives when our emotions spill over into violence.

We can reclaim that pregnant woman and give her loss new meaning by looking at the text again with new eyes, so to speak. "A life in place of a life" reminds us to place ourselves into the situation of others, to allow our compassion to inform the choices we make, before we hurt someone. We are commanded to see ourselves in each other — a life in place of a life.

I swear, I was holding her in my arms and changing her diaper yesterday. Today, I saw her ride a bicycle for the first time. Tomorrow, I guess, I'll watch her graduate high school. I know that it doesn't end there, either. Our babies stop being babies before we are ready.

We could see this as a tragic circumstance. We could mourn how life speeds by us and how little girls grow up in the blink of an eye. But, I think, there is also something beautiful in the way we watch the years tick by. Our lives are finite and we never get to experience the same moment twice, so when the real milestones do occur, we have the chance to appreciate them with immense depth. We get to remind ourselves that this moment will never come again. Pay attention.

I will never forget the day she was born, the way her hair smelled when I held her for the first time. Her first step is like fireworks in my memory. The tears in her eyes when her grandfather died are also there in my mind, a precious reminder of life's fragility.

Mortality is a gift. By living lives that are a one-way journey from birth to death, we can know how much each moment matters. There is no rewind button that will allow me to really experience my child's first bicycle ride again the way I experienced it today. I cannot keep it safe in the TiVo of my mind to feel it all over again. We have the chance to know that what matters most in life, moment by moment, is what is happening right now. If, somehow, we could see time with God's eyes—seeing every moment in each moment—we would never know the beauty of now.

Today is the second anniversary of my starting this blog. It is a minor milestone, to be sure, but it is one that tempts me to look back at some of the 280 posts I've written over that time. There are little moments and big moments here. Each one was something that meant something to me—weddings and funerals, insights and discoveries, changes and chances. It is the stuff of life.

In some ways, this blog has served as a way for me to keep memories alive. I may not be able to relive powerful moments—and I don't think I would want to—but I can keep a reminder of how much they moved me, touched me, taught me, wounded me, or kept me.

Sharing those moments with you also is an interesting experience. In some ways, it is what being a rabbi is all about. I feel that it is a privilege to be present with other people in some of their most important life moments, and it is a privilege to have others share in my moments, too. By the most recent count, 21,220 unique individuals have visited this website. That's a whole lot of sharing. That short video of a little girl will look quaint in twenty years, if it lasts that long. By 2033, the cars parked in my neighbors' driveways will seem like antiques and that girl on the bicycle will, God willing, be a grown woman. The immediacy of the moment—the sacred now—only happens once. It is our challenge and our opportunity to grab it.

Welcome

This blog is about living a joyful Jewish life and bringing joy to synagogues and the Jewish community. Join the conversation by commenting on posts and sharing your experiences. For more on the topic, read the First Post.